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Trump’s Stance on the Paris Climate Agreement is Criticized by 375 Scientists

Yesterday, 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel Prize winners, posted an open letter reviewing the basics of established climate science, decrying claims of hoax and hype spouted by Republicans during the presidential campaign and warning against the United States pulling out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

As I’ve stressed before, this is both a remarkable achievement, gauged through the lens of diplomacy, and a largely inconsequential one, gauged from the standpoint of the atmosphere. There remains a huge “reality gap” between the wishful greenhouse-gas emissions projections used to determine whether the agreement can avoid dangerous warming and the global capacity to cut emissions even as human energy needs continue to surge in coming decades.

This isn’t the first time there’s been such an effort. Six years ago, after hundreds of climate researchers’ email exchanges were posted online, fueling conservative lawmakers’ attempts to challenge climate science, 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences signed a letter defending the integrity of research pointing to dangerous global warming.

But this is the first such letter in the heat of a presidential campaign. The drafting of the new letter was led by two climate researchers, Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and two astrophysicists, George Field of Harvard and Ray Weymann, who is retired from the Carnegie Institution and devotes much of his time these days to climate change education.

Here’s their prime point about the Paris agreement:

[I]t is of great concern that the Republican nominee for President has advocated U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord. A “Parexit” would send a clear signal to the rest of the world: “The United States does not care about the global problem of human-caused climate change. You are on your own.” Such a decision would make it far more difficult to develop effective global strategies for mitigating and adapting to climate change. The consequences of opting out of the global community would be severe and long-lasting – for our planet’s climate and for the international credibility of the United States.

The United States can and must be a major player in developing innovative solutions to the problem of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Nations that find innovative ways of decarbonizing energy systems and sequestering CO2 will be the economic leaders of the 21st century. Walking away from Paris makes it less likely that the U.S. will have a global leadership role, politically, economically, or morally. We cannot afford to cross that tipping point.

Will it make a difference to voters who are so disengaged that they have not already locked in on a candidate?

There’ll be no science debate for the presidential candidates, but the organization with that name solicited replies from the four candidates’ campaigns to 20 questions on science and policy.Credit ScienceDebate.org

Here’s the Science Debate climate question:

The Earth’s climate is changing and political discussion has become divided over both the science and the best response. What are your views on climate change, and how would your administration act on those views?

Think of Trump’s stump rhetoric, full of definitive superlatives, as you read this bizarrely wishy-washy response:

There is still much that needs to be investigated in the field of “climate change.” Perhaps the best use of our limited financial resources should be in dealing with making sure that every person in the world has clean water. Perhaps we should focus on eliminating lingering diseases around the world like malaria. Perhaps we should focus on efforts to increase food production to keep pace with an ever-growing world population. Perhaps we should be focused on developing energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels. We must decide on how best to proceed so that we can make lives better, safer and more prosperous.

So is there a chance he’d shift?

Perhaps.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.